


Arachnidism

by spacejargon



Series: Spider Venom [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen, Humor, Mild Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-02 14:58:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16307351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacejargon/pseuds/spacejargon
Summary: A spider's venom can be one of the deadliest things known to man. Somewhere along the line, a spider meets its venom.





	1. Chapter 1

No one is really _sad_ to see it go: Carlton Drake’s last vestiges finding no new employment, so of course like any company that’s been exposed for murder in the first with an extensive record, it floats in the water. Not like the pieces of his rocket, though, as those shot into the water like shooting fish in a barrel, burning as they smacked into the water and cut through a foot for every life taken by the company. Of course, the bottom comes up sooner or later.

So in the spirit of keeping old ghosts dead and new ones at the same haunt, Carlton Drake’s company is swiftly removed, ripped straight from the source. Another one settles in, the same kind that sets the hair on the back of his neck on end, rumbling around with the electricity of a live wire in its hands, inching toward the water.

 _Talk_ doesn’t stay quiet. There are rumors that pass Eddie by while he’s out playing vigilante journalist, sinking their backwards teeth in and hooking on until he finally takes notice. Of course he does his best to keep his research on the down low, but journalistic integrity has nothing to do with impatience and an equally restless, parasitic conscience.

The new company has a boring, goody-two-shoes name it rolls with: _Atlantica._ How much more telling can it get from that?

The answer? Not much. Atlantica takes good care of Drake’s things by gutting the entire place, purging all remnants of what was once there over time. Months pass since the explosive last stand with slow change; out with the old, in with the new.

As time goes by, leading Eddie on a scenic tour of California chasing leads on anyone still standing from the Life Foundation, but when his searches come up mysteriously empty, he just can’t rest.

Atlantica doesn’t currently do anything public. Interviews with the CEO have been bland and unintelligible as Eddie glances over them in the morning paper. Like she, Dr. Mari Chen, wants to keep everything under tight wraps until her company resembles something of a mummy in a tomb of fancy high-tech equipment.

Naturally he decides to send several emails requesting an interview. The infamous Eddie Brock sitting at a library computer, sending at least three emails to the CEO, her second in command, and the alleged head of the ex-Carlton Drake location where construction equipment can still be spotted from the bridge.

Sitting in a public library cramped into an uncomfortable chair, he’s just about to head for coffee and a bite to eat when his homepage to his email refreshes. His eyes catch a peculiar headline, one he swears he just saw moments ago.

The mouse creaks under his fingers when he can’t click it fast enough. Sure enough, the sender is none other than Mari Chen, with her signature as the CEO of Atlantica scrawled on the bottom of the email as a digital imprint of herself.

The message is clear after the first few words of politeness. _I apologize but unfortunately at this time I cannot allow an interview with you,_ _Mr. Brock. The current status of Atlantica is under construction and I ask that you please respect that and continue your wait until we are fully operational. Thank you for your interest in Atlantica._

Translation: how stupid do you think I am?

He chuckles to himself, reading over the email again to let the words sink in. How odd for the CEO of a company with a shady reputation in his mind emails him so quickly, like she just happened to be at the computer and thought oh, Eddie Brock is surely a priority to politely but firmly tell him to get lost.

Another opinion slithers into the spotlight. **What a welcoming invitation.**

“You heard it first,” Eddie murmurs back, aware he’s not the only one in this ghost town of a library so early in the morning, but there are a few spirits that could become something more than a body across the room. “Guess Dr. Chen doesn’t want us to make a surprise visit to...” he scans the email, checking over her signature, “...Portland, Oregon?”

 **It never hurts to check in on her,** Venom suggests, though it’s no use trying to sell what’s already been sold. **Her little pet project is too boring to pass up on.**

Eddie clicks through articles on the internet as he racks up some information on the CEO, though there’s just about as much as he knows when it comes to Atlantica. Like it was founded forty years ago, back in the _seventies,_ for Christ’s sake, and he’s never even heard of them before until they decided to put their name in big letters on Carlton Drake’s old _pet project._

As he browses articles, writing down an address to Atlantica’s headquarters, Venom stirs impatiently. **What’re you waiting for?**

“Just taking care of a few things,” Eddie chimes in, logging out of the computer once he’s got everything he needs. On his palm is the address, scrawled in messy blue ink from a pen he stole from the front desk. “It’s not every day a disgraced reporter lands an interview with a CEO, but going by my previous record, we can start betting on how weird things’ll go.”

Pushing through the glass doors, he hits the freshly crisp autumn air and feels the chill of a cold front latch its teeth into him. Venom coils and twists, inherently restless as Eddie scouts out a coffee shop to hit up.

‘ **Weird’?**

“Oh, come on,” he huffs, ignoring a few curious looks his way as he shoves his hands in his pockets and tries not to feel the sting of the icy breeze rolling through the streets of San Francisco. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what that means. You’ve been in my head long enough.”

**You have an unusual way of defining ‘catastrophic’.**

“Eh, says you.” Eddie finds a small place that isn’t Starbucks and makes his way in, holding the door open for a couple that pays no attention to him, too focused on each other when one of them nearly walks right into Eddie. In the traditional San Fran way, not a single apology is uttered from either of them. Oh well.

As soon as he gets the door closed behind him the heat hits him, quickly melting the sheen of ice that had been creeping over his skin. He sighs and smells the strong taste of black coffee, his eye catching the display case filled with sickly sweet culinary delights.

Venom directs Eddie’s attention to a pumpkin-shaped scone with a face. **That one,** he insists, earning a muffled laugh as Eddie mentally makes a comment about Venom’s tastes that goes completely ignored. The kid at the counter doesn’t pay attention, grabbing his black coffee and pumpkin spice scone that makes Eddie salivate too thickly, all at once.

“Whoa there, knock it off,” he swallows, not too enthusiastic about the taste of pumpkin spice like a certain someone. “Coffee first, then you can have what you want. I can’t just eat it all at once—I’m not in my twenties anymore.”

**Old man.**

He narrows his eyes at nothing in particular. “Watch it, or I’m gonna go vegan like all those other kids in their twenties.”

A snarl fills his ears as he takes his coffee from the unassuming barista, dropping a dollar with a few quarters into the tip jar as he does. **You wouldn’t dare.**

“Bite me,” is the first thing that he says and he quickly amends it. “On second thought, don’t. Don’t even think about it.”

Defiantly winding Eddie’s fingers around the scone in its wrapping, he finds himself biting into the sugary confection with no shortage of spite. Venom hisses at him, his grasp slipping away once the sugar melts on Eddie’s tongue and placates the irritable parasite.

“So touchy,” Eddie makes a face, scraping his tongue with his teeth and taking a quick swallow from coffee that scalds his tongue like a brand. “Y’know, I never woulda thought that you’re supposed to be some terrifying alien parasite bent on destroying humanity, the way you chomp into pumpkin spice scones.”

**I _will_ eat you. **

The growl reverberating in Eddie’s throat furthers his case.

~

“How is it that I knew you would show up where you aren’t invited?” Dr. Chen’s voice rings out after her secretary leads Eddie to the large office bathed in slate gray. Dr. Chen sits before him at her desk, clicking through pages on her computer he wishes he could see, turning to write on papers lying in front of her obscured by her monitors.

“Well, the quick response felt like a personal invitation,” Eddie reasons, taking in the gray world of Portland, Oregon, just a week after starting out on his personal quest. “You know, taking Carlton Drake’s spot doesn’t look so good for people who aren’t trying to advertise they’re just as crazy, if not more so, than him.”

He managed to get here his own way, meaning public transportation with the beginnings of a cold is a no-no. Venom happily obliged, still frustrated about the meaning of whether or not Eddie is actually sick from a different sort of bug, one which opens the gateway for subtle barbs toward _other_ parasites.

Dr. Chen, or so says her gold nameplate on her desk along with the degrees on her back wall, glances up at him. She’s not smiling. “Well, it’s just as well that I have no connections to the Life Foundation, or the late Carlton Drake. I simply saw free real estate and I took advantage of it.”

“You don’t say,” Eddie murmurs aloud, surveying her walls filled with degrees and awards that mean nothing to him. “Well, I just thought that I’d follow a curiosity, and that led me here.”

“I’m aware,” Dr. Chen folds her hands as she slides one monitor out of the way, the papers before her disappearing when it pulls away. “You are known for your groundbreaking ‘curiosity’, Mr. Brock.”

He smiles with a split of teeth. “And you’re known for your research in astrophysics. Except that didn’t lead to the end of your career.” Venom sneers at him from somewhere in his head, the sound echoing with the presence of congestion that makes him sniff to keep his nose from running. Raising a hand, he wipes his nose self-consciously, swallowing with a dry throat. “Or, just the second part of it.”

“You certainly are interesting, Mr. Brock. I’m impressed you came this far just to do a report on me.” Her hands remain clasped, her gray suit as bland as the rainy skies outside the window to the right, the same color as the walls and the desk. Everything here is in a shade of morally ambiguous gray. “But,” she intones, with the same seriousness as a childhood oncology doctor with unfortunate news, “I’m afraid I cannot give you a full interview today. Usually I ask for appointments to be made, but you went ahead and showed up here anyway.”

“Well I mean you _did_ let me in. As soon as I showed up at the gates, you told your guards to let me in. In fact, the whole time I was here, your secretary only asked if I had an appointment. No one told me to leave.” His eyes get lost in the dizzying patterns that emerge from the gray carpeting he stands on. “So it seems like maybe you _wanted_ me to show up unannounced. Kind of seems like a lot to just ignore up ‘til now, don’t it?”

Dr. Chen’s serious facade starts to crumble. She smiles, with the anomaly of it reaching her eyes as she unclasps her hands and stands. “When you put it like that, perhaps I may have had an interest in your work. Or simply because I know that your work often doesn’t paint favorable pictures of people like me. For good reasons, I’m certain, though I hope not to be classified on the same end when you inevitably publish something about me.”

Despite her unorthodox methods, he can’t help but favor her humor. “Too bad it’ll just have to be a speculative piece, seeing as there’s no room for a proper interview. Guess I’ll have to keep my readers guessing.”

“Or lead them down the path you want them to think,” Dr. Chen comes around her desk, leaning against it as she rubs a smudge of ink on the side of her pinky. “Come on, you don’t honestly believe I have no idea who or what you are, do you?”

Eddie swallows, his throat as dry as the desert. The cold doesn’t help one bit. “Do you now?”

Her shoulder-length hair sways with the shake of her head as she presents a professional smile. On her, it looks knowing. “Who doesn’t know about Eddie Brock, the hard-hitting journalist not afraid of voicing opinions? Surely after the Carlton Drake episode you wouldn’t be able to live in the shadows, would you?”

Her words act like sand under his skin; gritty and rubbing with each and every movement he makes, from he rasp of trying to breathe to the twitch of his fingers. “What about you, the elusive CEO of Atlantica with a wall full of degrees? Because I’ve never heard of you before.”

Dr. Chen shrugs, glancing out the window as she braces her hands against her desk. Open posture: unafraid of him or his questions. If she didn’t unnerve him so much, maybe he’d like her. “It’s a long story, but I’m afraid I’m just a private business owner that works occasionally with NASA. We like to think of ourselves as pioneers of space, in order to better understand the planet we live on.”

“So, what do you do then?” The clock on the wall says it’s been five minutes of this Mexican standoff. This is the last draw. “I’m pretty curious to find out, and I’m sure there are plenty of others like me.”

Dr. Chen chuckles as she pushes off from her desk, following his gaze to the clock on the wall. She checks her own wristwatch with a sigh. “I guess I have time to give a start of an explanation,” she begins, much to Eddie’s immediate surprise and subsequent suspicion. “So, Mr. Brock, would you like a tour?”

The words catch in his throat. “I thought you said I had to make an appointment, Dr. Chen.”

She laughs again, holding a hand up to cover her mouth as she shakes her head in a mix of disbelief and amusement. “That would be my normal standard, yes, but you’re not exactly a normal journalist, Mr. Brock.”

As she approaches him, he almost moves away to flatten against the wall, only to grab the door and pull it open. She walks in front of him with a nod and a word of thanks, turning back to him as soon as he follows after her.

“Besides, if I sent you away, you’d just be more persistent until you got what you wanted,” she continues, waiting for him as she begins to walk, leading the way with the click of her heels. “I’d rather keep your hospitality for as long as I’m able, rather than foster your attention in other ways.”

“Right,” he mutters, falling in place beside her. Towering over her easily in stature, he can’t help but feel the urge to shrink back, scolding the thought as soon as it appears.

~

Nothing throughout the process of his semi-formal interrogation immediately screams ‘I’m an evil psychopath with an inclination for bringing on the downfall of humanity’. Which, fortunately for him, is a good start. Except he’s Eddie Brock, the one and only, and the dark side of fame means never trusting the first thing that comes out of someone’s mouth.

The lab is hardly half the size of Carlton Drake’s Life Foundation, to which Dr. Chen explains this is mainly her headquarters, preferring to keep it small to keep business at a profiting level. What exactly she means by this she leaves as open-ended as the question Eddie pegs her with.

“We do have a few labs where we deal with equipment, particularly newer models we’re coming up with in terms of our research. Mostly they’re just telescopes and what have you, nothing all that special.” Dr. Chen turns back to him as she leads him through the gray building with gray walls and gray floors, and he’s pretty sure he’s going to be sick if he sees another piece of gray. The entirety of the building is draped in boring, muted gray, with sparse decorations that seem more like an indicator of a non-hostile environment rather than something welcoming.

Everything feels robotic.

“Nothing special? I don’t know if I’d agree with that.” He searches for every inclination of something off. He’s already messed up by this cold that just won’t quit, starting to rattle his bones with stifled shivers and the many times he can get away with wiping his nose before Dr. Chen calls attention to it. “How could all that fancy equipment be nothing special?”

They reach a large door that has some very interesting security systems, including an electronic keypad with a slot for an ID card, no doubt. A few security guards pass them by, quiet conversation radiating beyond them as Eddie watches them go with an itch of curiosity but the feeling never comes.

“Let’s be honest, shall we? You’re not here for my telescopes because you can read about them online somewhere, I’m certain. You want to know what’s not being published.” She turns, crossing her arms as she waits for a response. “Am I wrong, Mr. Brock?”

Feeling his hackles rise, he forces the feeling back down. “Why would you do that for me?”

“If it keeps you happy and out of breaking the law to discover what ‘secrets’ I have behind your back, then I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of privacy.” She eyes him critically, looking him up and down with a stern gaze. “On the condition that if you must write about me, you don’t break into any of my facilities to do so. You may not have put it in plain speak, Mr. Brock, but I can read between the lines of your email.”

He chuckles weakly at that, feeling it scrape his throat and sting his eyes. “You really wanna do this? Seems like you’re making my job too easy.” Despite his attempts at a not so subtle joke that has a curved point, he can’t get behind it at all. All he feels is sick, and while journalistic integrity is what keeps him going through the worst of conditions, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to skip breakfast and dinner from last night.

Come to think of it, when was the last time he ate?

Dr. Chen clears her throat, forcing his attention back to her as he finds himself staring at the floor, nausea creeping up his spine. “Do we have a deal, Mr. Brock?”

“Mm, I dunno...if you’re gonna tell me your secrets so willingly, maybe it’s not worth investigating,” he slurs, coughing as his mouth fills with saliva that threatens to drown him. “Why would you be so nice to someone like me, huh? You’re getting nothing out of this.”

Dr. Chen’s stern look fades into something else. “Mr. Brock,” she starts, softer than before, “are you all right? You look quite pale.”

He squints his eyes at her, suspicion clinging like a tick on a dog. He can’t just let it go, not when his head swirls and refuses to let him think for longer than a second. With the rapid onset of what is most definitely beyond a cold, he coughs again, spit flying everywhere before he can cover his mouth.

“Mr. Brock?” Dr. Chen touches his shoulder, her expression softened with concern as he remembers she has two kids, a son and a daughter. “Mr. Brock, I believe you need to sit down. There’s an emergency exit through this section of the lab—if you’re not feeling well, I can call you an ambulance.”

Unable to come up with a good counter argument, he nods numbly, feeling Dr. Chen take his arm as she presses buttons on the keypad, sliding her ID card. The door makes a beeping noise, a blurry green light in his eyes as her arm moves to wrap around his shoulders.

On the inside there are a few scientists moving about, all with purposes that keep them routed into their tasks. Dr. Chen’s voice is in his ear as they start to buzz loudly, swallowing down the rise of bile to feel his ears close up.

“Hey, I need help over here!” Dr. Chen’s voice rings out like a shot in the dark, attracting the scientists that are within earshot. A few drop what they’re doing, a man and a woman, and rush over as Dr. Chen hands Eddie off to them and he’s certain he’s doomed.

“Get him somewhere he can lie down. I’m going to call an ambulance,” Dr. Chen orders, taking a worried glance at Eddie as the two scientists help him stand upright.

Eddie, of course, doesn’t back down easily. He struggles to fight his way out of their grasp, but the male scientist is a force to be reckoned with. His muscles aren’t wrinkles under his lab coat, that’s for certain.

A gnawing pain on his stomach makes him more anxious. Another shiver erupts from within, taking over every inch of him.

“Mr. Brock, I apologize for your unfortunate luck, but you need to lie down.” Dr. Chen moves to address her employees, pulling out a cellphone from a concealed pocket in her suit. “I’m going to call an ambulance. Get the medical team down here while I call for help.”

After that, the rest of the world comes and goes in blurry waves. He feels himself retch, bile burning up his throat like the coffee he had a week ago, except far more bitter and not nearly as pleasant. The woman on his arm asks if he’s okay, and then suddenly he’s moving, being led into another room.

A shiver wracks his spine, chattering his teeth. “What did you do to me?” he spits out, no more certain of himself than he is of the two scientists that lead him down the hall. “Get off of me! I’m not falling for this shit!”

He tears away just as the woman tries to argue with him, the pristine white of her lab coat acting like a warning in gleaming screaming white. Alarm shrieks from his mind, where no voice answers but his own and he stumbles to get away, too stubborn to be led down to wherever they think they’re taking him.

 **Eddie,** Venom finally makes a reappearance, having been silent much more than usual as of late. **_Eddie._**

“No, no! Don’t even start with me!” he shouts as he breaks into a run, relying on adrenaline to keep him functional long enough to look for an exit. But the hallways bleed and melt together, and with the sound of frantic footsteps following after him, his brain can’t sort out what’s real and what’s not.

He slams into a scientist carrying a tray of tools, each one clattering to the ground as several glass beakers break. The fallen woman lets loose with a startled cry, left in the aftermath as Eddie breezes past her, refusing to stop and meet an unfortunate end.

A door comes up when the hallway runs short. At its handle is a green light, his fingers wrapping around the metal as shouts come from behind him, all in the chorus of chaos.

“Sir! Sir, you’re not allowed in there! Don’t go in there!”

Ignoring the warnings, he flings the door open to a room with scientists standing in front of a strange object that looks like an upright circle. It has a light that follows its shape, glowing with a ghostly green of a light at the end of a dock, the siren in the night.

“Sir! Sir!” More shouts continue as he pitches forward, about to lose his balance when Venom rights him. Just as Venom tries to get through the haze that is brought on by an almost certain delirium, Eddie moves toward the green light. All of it in hopes of keeping the lab coats away, memories filtering back to fill in the blanks that don’t fit with Dr. Chen’s laboratory and more with Carlton Drake’s.

The circle looks like something ripped off of Stargate SG-1, to an eerily similar degree. When he looks through it, the air and background behind it is rippled with a strange quality of the wall behind it looking like a cheap impostor.

“Sir! Get back!”

Eddie scrambles up the door, called to the green light with an insistence that refuses to leave him. He moves as Venom threads out warnings, all bypassed and ignored in favor of the rippling air, to which he reaches a hand out to.

He hears a siren going off, red lights flashing and far too bright to comprehend. One moment he’s sticking his hand into the rippling air only to watch it completely disappear, submerged in cold as a scientist runs toward him, having been shaken off before with cries of alarm that go unheard.

The next minute, the air is red and the weird circle is glowing red. But the green light remains, an invisible force beyond the empty space Eddie’s hand has disappeared to tugging with the very real certainty of grabbing hold of his missing hand.

“Turn it off! Turn it off!”

“I can’t turn it off! Someone grab him!”

Cold envelops Eddie as the shouts grow louder. One more tug at his hand and he’s diving headfirst, plunging into icy cold that shocks him to the core.

~

The first gasp of air aches to the depths of where his soul would be. Unsurprisingly, he finds himself lying face down on the ground, the concrete chilled to its earthen underbelly and the wind is freezing cold.

When he struggles to his feet, nausea takes him violently by the throat. In the view of people milling about, hundreds of them everywhere at once, he doubles over and retches until something black and looks like coffee grounds spills out of his throat with a sickening splash onto the ground. His stomach churns and twists violently, his ears, eyes, nose, _everything_ on fire as his stomach tries to invert itself.

In the middle of his aggressive meeting with his stomach, his knees crumble and he hits the street, eyes and voices a thousand miles away as more and more gunk comes up. He’s pretty sure he’s bleeding, but just like with the people standing around him, he doesn’t necessarily give a damn.

That is, until a voice cuts in, and it isn’t Venom’s.

“Dude, are you okay? You don’t look okay...” Far away as it sounds, it’s also close enough to catch through all the murmurs and city noise going on around him. When Eddie glances up, he catches a bright combination of red and blue and promptly turns to throw up again.

“Aw, geez,” the voice, sounding too young to be anything belonging to someone his age, continues on. The red and blue dance in place, antsy, but they come closer. “Crap, this is not good.”

A hand touches his shoulder and is met with slime, earning a startled cry from the red and blue blur as Venom makes a reappearance, though just as disoriented as Eddie is.

 **Who the hell is this guy?** He sounds groggy, as if suffering the same way Eddie is. Odd—Eddie didn’t think Venom _could_ get sick. Or maybe he’s just losing his mind. **Where the hell are we?**

Wiping his mouth, he tries not to look at the vomit puddle at his feet. “Don’t know,” he slurs, coughing a few times to clear out the muck in his throat. “What happened?”

His talk with Venom doesn’t last long before an interruption breaks in. “What the heck was that!?” Eddie turns, his vision clearing a bit as he takes in the source of the sound—clad in a red and blue...onesie?

“Okay, what the _fuck?_ ” Eddie curses to himself, earning no definitive answer from Venom. The kid’s screeching grates his nerves as he stumbles in place, trying to remember how he managed to get here, but nothing comes to him.

 **You’re telling me,** Venom snaps back, irritated like a wet cat dumped in a bucket of ice water.

Tires screech as the kid quits dancing around in his onesie, with an odd spider pattern emblazoned on the front of it. If it wasn’t so garishly bright, it could’ve been cool—in a hipster comic book store.

Speaking of comic books…

When he looks up again, there are people running away. The spider onesie kid…whatever he is, whips to the sound of cars speeding down the road. Eddie takes notice shortly after, discombobulated all the while.

“Not good, not good!” he starts with a jump, flinching in his onesie as he glances to Eddie, and then upward. When Eddie tries to follow his gaze, he gets dizzy. “Get out of the way! I’ve got something to take care of!”

 **So do we,** Venom hisses, danger flitting through Eddie’s mind as Venom simmers under his skin. Before Eddie has time to question, four black SUVs pull up to a screeching halt, and suddenly there are guns pointing at him from open doors and bullets that quickly follow.

Eddie throws an arm over his face, a wall of black extending from his arm to catch the bullets as Venom snaps at him to get going. He does as told, sparing a look to the kid—or, rather, where he _was,_ as the kid has disappeared from sight.

Uninterested in following that lead, he turns to the men with guns and throws his arm, black sludge wrapping around a car and tossing it like a frisbee down the street. It crashes into light poles and other parked cars, metal screaming and glass shattering all the way.

More bullets unload in a heavy spray as he holds out an arm, the black wall of Venom’s arm leaving bullets on the ground as they immediately sink once they hit. The chimes of every bullet distract from the screams of fleeing people, adrenaline once again kicking him back into shape.

As he approaches the cars, grabbing one gunman with a shout of _“mask!”_ and a responding **_copy,_** a flash of blue and red catches his attention from the corner of his eye. Venom creeps over him like a tight suit, fleshing out with an angered roar as bullets continue to fire, enraging him further.

Venom is more stable on his feet as he claws at a gunman with an AK-47, pulling the man out of the car when he jumps up, ripping an arm through the roof and plucking a man out with ease. The guy still tries to shoot at him, bullets only wrinkling the slime that covers him while he wriggles like a fish on a line.

His spine pops with a sickening crunch. Venom tosses him to the curb, his broken gun following after. Violence erupts as more guns sound and there are more wild shouts from gruff voices that speak only one language: death.

“What the fuck _is_ that thing!?” Another shouts as a car barrels down the street, aiming for Venom when he hits the ground, swinging an arm to take out a few more men. They all crumple like paper-mâché, blood spilling and bones breaking when the bodies hit the ground.

Explosive gunfire from behind him distracts from the large spider’s web that appears from the sky, ignoring the cry of alarm when he turns to face another goon with a gun. This one has a much bigger variation of a shotgun, firing incessantly as bullets catch in Venom’s teeth.

“ **You,”** he snaps, wrenching the gun out of the man’s hands and breaking it into pieces. **“You piss me off!”**

A hand seizes the man’s throat as his eyes bulge with terror, lifting off the ground as Venom hoists him in the air, ignoring the chaos remaining as his lips split to reveal rows of fangs. **“I’ve had enough of you people for one day, and now it’s time you repay the favor.”**

He opens his mouth and his tongue flicks out, surveying the horrified man’s face as he tries to scream. His face turns an interesting shade of reddish purple, throat caught in Venom’s hands and soon his teeth when he closes his mouth over the man’s skull, crunching down straight through the vertebra.

The struggling stops as warm blood gushes into Venom’s throat, drinking it greedily as it comes. Awful as he feels, it makes him angrier when there are gunshots and strange people in an unfamiliar place. Eddie recoils from within, too sick to fight as Venom takes his fill.

He drops the body in favor of taking out the remaining few men left standing. Cars are wrecked all around him, covered in spiderwebs that surely weren’t there before, but Venom pays it no attention. Instead, he roars, swiping to take out the remaining gunmen as bullets drip from his skin.

They all abruptly fall quiet when his teeth tear through their throats, shouts and cries music to his ears until the street’s bathed in silence. Only when the sound of car alarms remains does Venom finally pant, taking in gulps of air and dissipates back into Eddie without warning.

Blood is on his lips when Eddie touches his fingers to them. He glances at the carnage, unfazed as he tastes brain matter and blood on his tongue, Venom not responding when he tries to reach out to him.

 _The gate,_ he thinks firmly, still in a dizzy bout of mind-numbing quiet, _Dr. Chen._

“Oh...” the noise abruptly brings Eddie back to reality as he swallows, trying to ignore the taste of the guy’s skull in his teeth. He turns, surprised by the red and blue spider onesie who has a hand to his face, and if his mask was off, Eddie would bet his face would be a shade of green. “Oh my God, you bit that guy’s head off.”

Sheepish and cold, Eddie shrugs. “Uh, I have a parasite.” Not even he sounds too sure of himself.

The kid stares with his strange mask that obscures everything about him, looking oddly familiar. To which he promptly falls backward in a dead faint, thumping against the ground like a dead weight.

_Great._

While Eddie tries to recollect his bearings, he surveys the emptied street, Venom slithering back into existence as Eddie catches sight of the collapsed onesie kid.

**We could eat him.**

“What? No, we’re not...” his stomach clenches tightly and an arm goes to wrap around himself. “We’re not eating the onesie kid.”

Venom scowls, still insistent. **What a waste**.

The disheartening sound of steel collapsing on the ground behind him is quick to interrupt any feelings of cannibalizing a kid in spider pajamas.

When he turns, he meets with a metal...thing, painted in red and yellow. _What the hell._

The iron man, going by the looks of its armor, doesn’t get a chance to speak. Instead, the guy’s head decides it doesn’t agree with Eddie’s stomach and he quickly finds himself choking back up pieces of bone and brain matter, blood splashing on the ground mixed with stomach acid.

‘ _What happened to_ not _doing that?’_ he thinks to himself miserably, feeling as though he’s been put into a shitty comic book that aims to make him as miserable as possible.

The iron man holds up a hand and it glows bright orange as one final thought crosses his mind.

_What the fuck is going on?_

The face of the armor retreats to reveal an actual, very angry one. “Why don’t you tell me,” the guy snaps, and it’s clear he’s in no mood to be trifled with. “Before I turn you into your buddies you made a mess of.”

Well, _shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not too sure about leaving this as a one off, so...perhaps not.
> 
> Thank you for reading.


	2. Chapter 2

To Eddie’s never-ending misery, it’s not long after he purges himself of everything within his gut does he hit the solid ground. Just like the spider onesie kid, who is still a stain on pavement when the iron Ronald McDonald steps forward, spitting threats like he has the _right_ to.

The world turns black and dark, not unlike the inside of Venom’s protective layers. This time, Venom makes no sound when Eddie feels his feet falling from underneath him.

On the other hand, the unimpressed, certainly disgusted Tony Stark watches as some big bad flattens himself on the ground like a mime portraying a steam roller. So okay, it’s not the best impersonation, but it leaves a lot of questions that sit on bloodied pavement where bodies, headless and not, start to rot.

He turns to Peter, sighing deeply through his nose. He’s never going to hear the end of this.

Muttering a quick command to Friday, his choice of the day, he waits for his automated suits of iron to arrive. It won’t be long before someone tips off the police—to which sirens sound in the distance, rather close for this part of town. Explaining all of this, headless bodies et al, is going to be much harder than giving a lecture to himself on why he should’ve never let Peter stay in the Avengers tower for his latest internship.

Sirens grow closer as a warning displays on the screen that snaps over his head along with his helmet. Police arriving in T-minus five minutes: just exactly what he doesn’t need at current moment.

He scoops Peter off the ground as he waits for his bots to arrive. Another comes and he nods toward the body of the weird slime creature masquerading as a human, the suit taking measures to collect him as well. As for the others that arrive, well, he can’t exactly bail himself out in five minutes. Peter is far more important than explaining to flabbergasted cops.

It leaves him in an uncomfortable position. He hates to do it, but he can’t sit and chat when Peter’s out cold and the poor kid’s traumatized forever.

“Friday, link me to Fury,” he murmurs aloud, bristling at the mention. Friday responds aptly, the sound of ringing quieted down to a tolerable alarm in the background as he surveys his surroundings. The cops are growing nearer and he’s no better at coming up for excuses.

A gruff, cranky voice answers his hopeless prayers. _“You should not have this number.”_

“Good to know,” Tony snaps back, forcing down his ire to hold onto Peter and not crush the kid. “Listen, I’ve got a situation. A _really_ bad situation in downtown New York.”

There’s a long pause where a deep, exasperated sigh fills the silence. _“Why do I get the feeling you’ve done some irrevocably stupid shit?”_

“Look, I’ll explain later. Right now I need you to figure out how to tell the cops there are dead bodies everywhere and the situation’s sort of handled, as far as immediate violence is concerned.” Peter’s vitals are dropping and Tony’s heart starts to race, as alerted to by Friday. “I’ve got a kid and some other pressing issues at the moment. Call it cashing in on a favor, will you?”

“ _Uh uh, what kind of favor is this? Tony Stark doesn’t call me up asking for favors out of the blue. Especially ones involving dead bodies on the damn sidewalk.”_ A pause feels like an eternity. Fury sounds like he’s just realizing that Tony is dead serious. _“Are those sirens I hear in the background? Stark, what the_ hell _have you gotten yourself into?”_

Tony’s mask snaps shut as the first are spotted speeding up the road. If he could, he’d pinch the bridge of his nose and demand a margarita or three. “Call it a massacre on the _New York Times_ front page. Look, can you cover for me or not? Cops are coming and I really don’t wanna be on their bad side.”

A deep, pissed off sigh lingers between them for seconds Tony doesn’t have. _“I’ll see what I can do. As long as you actually_ tell _me what the hell is going on, sure, why not just stick myself in a situation I don’t belong in. Let’s see how that works.”_

“Great, thanks buddy. I’ll call you back later.” Nodding to his drones, he takes off so quickly the asphalt bursts from underneath him. Oops.

Right before Friday ends the call, Fury’s voice can still be heard. _“I swear to whatever you find holy that I will personally hunt you down and—”_

“Bye now.” Friday ends the call, leaving him free to think of what to say when Peter wakes up, if whatever trauma he’s suffered— _nothing more than minor injuries—_ Friday chimes in, too cheerful for such an occasion. It’s a good thing she doesn’t care whether or not there are headless men lying on a street in New York.

~

The first voice he wakes to is not the one he expects above all else. First of all, he’s never even heard Venom as a woman—wait, scratch that, he has. As Annie, which is a very strange memory for many different reasons, but besides that, Venom has never sounded like a robot.

Pretty sure he's never called Venom ' _Friday'_ before either, wherever that came from.

“My scans detect a medical abnormality. Most likely a foreign body, other than the one currently within the medical bay.”

Eddie groans as he feels his stomach churning, not recalling any fond memories of ever enjoying the taste of human flesh as he begrudgingly thinks to himself. Within the haze of definitely feeling sick to his stomach, his inner voice sounds like shouting. _‘What the hell was that you ass.’_

“Mind giving me feedback on what you think it is? I know he looks like an alien, but he seemed pretty human besides the whole head-biting debacle.” To Eddie’s never-ending streak of fate mocking him, a familiar voice rings in his ears. “Actually, wait—no, my mistake. Even for a below average-looking guy, he’s still pretty weird.”

“I take offense to that,” Eddie grumbles aloud, not one to sit in the shadows behind his eyelids. Cracking his eyes open, he squints in the light, and rapidly comes to terms with what feels like bindings on his arms, chest, and legs. “At least I didn’t wear my spider onesie.”

The blur that deciphers itself as a stern-looking man quickly materializes with the loud scrape of a chair. “Like that’ll do anything for you. Hold on—what the heck did you just say?” The dark-haired man comes close, his face stuck in a permanent scowl like a really angry ripoff of a car dealer’s son who screams at his employees at his father’s business. “You’re cracking _jokes_ at a time like this? Who the hell are you?”

Eddie shivers in his bindings, ones that aren’t so comfortable on his raw nerves. “Eddie Brock, famous, or infamous, depending how you look at it, reporter. Used to work for MNBN, the late and not so great Carlton Drake happened to have a heavy hand in me losing my former career.” Eddie squints at the angry guy’s face, remembering a lot more red and yellow iron than what’s in front of him. “So...who’re you, and where are we?”

The guy stares at him for a bit. Then he shakes his head, turning his attention to the distance. “Jarvis, are you sure he’s just got a fever? I’m pretty sure this guy’s got brain damage.”

There’s a sudden whir of a fan and then he feels oddly warm, catching the flash of a bright blue light while his skin starts to heat up and his head spins.

The male voice returns. “Flu-like symptoms detected. No recent cranial trauma can be measured from previous records of trauma. However,” he pauses, if a robot can pause since Eddie has no idea where the voice is coming from, “his temperature is much higher than normal standards for a fever. If allowed to continue, he will suffer more traumatic brain damage than he is already acquainted with.”

A cough rattles up his throat from his ribs. “Would you _stop_ with the brain damage?” he asks not politely at all, because his head is on fire and the rest of him is ice cold and rubbed raw. He turns his attention back to the beaded wonder, pissed off by the bright lights and the general lack of having any memory of what’s going on. “Any more sassy butler voice and I’m gonna eat my own brain.”

**I wouldn’t recommend that.**

Ignoring Tony’s raised eyebrows, Eddie remembers pointedly that he can’t physically roll away from Venom’s reemerging voice.

“Where have you been, huh?” he spits, feeling a splitting pain down the center of his skull as soon as he asks. “Agh—!”

“Listen to me, whatever you are.” Eddie doesn’t have the time to snap back that it’s _Eddie Brock,_ miserably stewing in pain. “One, you’re not eating anyone. Not even yourself. I don’t even want to think about it, but that’s not the point. Two, what gave you the smart idea of biting heads off of bad guys in front of a high schooler?”

**Too hot.**

Eddie mutters something intelligible as the voice chimes in again, commotion just beginning. “His vital signs are showing extreme amounts of stress. His heartbeat has lowered to approximately one hundred ninety beats per minute while his temperature remains at a steadily increasing one hundred and eight degrees Fahrenheit.”

“I’m sorry, what?” The bearded man, the one the voice calls ‘Mr. Stark’, loses his hold on glaring Eddie to death. “Get his temp down then! Why didn’t you tell me that before, Jarvis!?”

Jarvis pauses for a minute, machines starting to make noises that sound like pesky alarms to Eddie’s ears as he feel warmth before a sudden chill ices him over. Venom’s voice in his head, he misses the calls of the bearded man for someone else, practically screaming with how loud his voice is.

‘ _I’m gonna die,’_ he thinks to himself, sweating and shaking with an ache in every bone in his body.

_**Eddie.** _

‘ _We are gonna die.’_

 **No we aren’t!** Venom roars back, quickly shrinking away as his voice echoes too loudly in Eddie’s skull. **I can fix it. I need to _concentrate._** He soon finds out how hard that is, sharing the same fever-riddled head. **Why won’t it stop!?**

Eddie conveniently checks out at that point, machines buzzing and making ear-splitting noise while Venom fades back into his corner. Too exhausted and cranky to deal with keeping Eddie alive while fighting has taken its toll, and it refuses to rest.

“Hey, Dr. Banner!” Tony calls once Bruce arrives, ushering him in while Jarvis reports Eddie Brock’s symptoms to be significantly life-threatening. “I’ve got a problem, and I’ve got no idea how to fix it.”

Bruce isn’t too certain what he means until he’s inside the medical bay and by then Tony’s sure that he’s gained the attention of a few other Avengers until he remembers they're not here. At this point, much as he’d rather not, the guy he essentially kidnapped is dying and he can’t just let that happen.

Not without a few answers, at least.

“Tony what the heck is going on?” Bruce pulls on his lab coat and maneuvers around the screens displaying heart rate and other vital signs. He touches the clammy forehead of Tony’s latest bad decision and recoils as if burned. “He’s seconds away from going into cardiac arrest at this rate. What did you do?”

“I didn’t! The guy collapsed before I could interrogate him.” While he may speak earnestly, he’s not too sympathetic toward Eddie. Bruce gives him a hard stare. “What?”

“I’m not a hospital doctor. There’s no way I can keep him alive.” Bruce works rapidly in tandem with Jarvis’ ever-helpful advice, wishing for Dr. Cho’s assistance while she’s unfortunately away at a conference. It’s the next best thing, since Tony happens to be unreasonable.

The sound of Eddie’s heart rate increasing faster than his heart can keep up with fills the room. “I’m sure you can,” Tony urges him, “you’re a doctor above all else. No hospital is going to know how to treat _that._ ”

It’s a harsh comfort when the heart monitor flatlines.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Bruce chants the words like a prayer under his breath as he retrieves the best substitute for paddles. Jarvis manipulates the slender appendages with coiling wires that come out of the cot’s sides, Bruce attaching them to Eddie’s chest as he counts down until Jarvis activates the defibrillators with a strong jolt.

Eddie’s heart stutters back to life as he jolts back up, coughing while pushed against the restraints. Like a distressing picture out of a horror movie Eddie’s bleary eyes snap open, choking and coughing for air until Jarvis is to the rescue, Bruce attaching an oxygen mask to Eddie’s face.

Bruce means to ask how Jarvis has all this equipment, but then decides it’s not the best idea to at the current moment. He chooses to try to calm down his newest patient, dismayed by the bonds for two very distinct reasons.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay. I’m Dr. Banner and I’m just trying to keep you alive.” Concerned by Eddie’s hazy eyes, he pulls out a pocket flashlight, shining it in them. “Can you hear me?”

Black veins suddenly appear to be wriggling in the skin around Eddie’s eyes, the skin darkening over them. While in the midst of a coughing fit, his watery eyes focus on Bruce.

“ **Hurts,”** Eddie’s voice is raspy and thick, but entirely not human. Another voice overlaps his, to the point of being indistinguishable. **“Everything hurts.”**

His lips move to form words that don’t come out, but eventually he musters up something. **“Why would you do that? I was fixing it!”**

“I’m sorry, what are you...” Bruce stares in disbelief as Eddie isn’t focused on him, or on anyone at all.

“Are you talking to me?”

Eddie’s eyes narrow. There’s an inhuman element to them that makes Bruce back off, forgetting about the dire situation in front of him. All the while, the heart monitor continues to beep with warnings, Eddie’s internal temperature far too hot for a normal human to tolerate while heat rolls off of him in waves.

“I...wasn’t,” Eddie swallows and his eyes struggle to readjust after a long blink, craning his neck over to Tony, calculating. He coughs hoarsely and shivers. “I’m really, really cold, y’know.”

“Unfortunately for you, you can’t have any more blankets right now,” Bruce speaks slowly like talking to a spooked jaguar. Behind the shadows of Eddie’s blank, listless facade, is something far more dangerous than the placid exterior. “You should be in a coma right now, actually.”

“Oh.” Tony’s longest streak of silence is about to be broken when he looks like he’s going to open his mouth, but thankfully Eddie cuts him off. “We _talked_ about this, damn it.”

Under his breath where his jaw moves in a grinding motion, Bruce swears he hear another voice. The next thing he knows is that Eddie’s temperature is rapidly dropping, and his heart rate jumps from one ninety to one twenty. The worst part about that? It keeps dropping.

Much like how Eddie drops faster than a hot stone in cold water, out cold.

Once he’s sure Eddie’s vitals won’t be tampered with any longer, through whatever means he just witnessed, Bruce cautiously looks up to Tony, now unable to stop himself.

“Let me rephrase my earlier question. What the _hell_ did you do, Tony?”

“Hey!” Tony holds up his hands, trying too hard to appear innocent. “I didn’t do anything. _He’s_ the guy that scarred Parker for the next century!”

“Parker?” Bruce repeats, sounding incredulous as he connects the dots. “You mean that spider kid? From New York?”

“No, the Indian delivery guy from that curry place down the street. Yes, the kid from New York. He’s here on...uh...internship. Well, a now canceled internship.”

“...I really don’t want to know.” That lasts for a total of one millisecond. “Actually, I do. What were you thinking, bringing a kid like him here? Didn’t he turn down this job?”

“One, it’s a long story. Two, it’s another long story. Listen, if this guy’s not going anywhere anytime soon, do you mind doing me a favor and keeping an eye on him? At least until I can check up on the poor kid before he has another panic attack.”

“Now wait a minute!” Bruce calls after Tony’s retreating back, but Tony’s long gone by the time he does make a break for it. “Hey, Tony, this isn’t—!”

When his words fall on deaf ears, he takes a look at the stats displayed before him, connected to a man whose name he doesn’t even know.

“Eddie Brock, or so he introduced himself,” Jarvis chimes in, only trying to be helpful. “From my preliminary scans, despite their limited range, I have determined that he is indeed infected with a parasitic body.”

Bruce strongly resists the urge to slap a hand into his forehead. It’s just what Tony would want, anyway.

“Jarvis, do me a favor and see if you can get a message to Dr. Cho. I’m going to need some help with this.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing deeply. “Otherwise, this day probably can’t get any weirder than this.”

“Of course,” Jarvis pulls up a screen similar to composing an email, awaiting instruction. “Ready when you are.”

“Right, okay: Dr. Cho, I know you’re currently busy with your excellent work and I commend it, but it seems like I’ve run into an issue. First of all, Tony’s managed to...” he trails off and shakes his head. “Wait, no, scratch that. That sounds too unprofessional.”

He tries a few more times to compose a proper-sounding message, his nerves frazzled and Tony’s most recent disappearance doesn’t lessen it one bit. Keeping track of vitals is his newest hobby at the moment, having abandoned his earlier pet project as soon as Tony managed to make a spectacle of himself.

Muttering under his breath, he pushes down irritation brimming just under his skin.“Y’know what, I’ll work on it later.”

~

As soon as Peter’s up and running, having recovered from his mild mild life crisis, he immediately makes a move to the kitchen. Despite Tony trying to talk some sense into him, maybe not eat so soon after going through a traumatic event—to which Peter asks if he’s his _dad—_ and refuses all attempts to be placated. Jarvis delivering food may be nice, but he doesn’t want to sit in bed all day with a fuzzy brain and little memory of what exactly happened.

Tony doesn’t say much about it. Going by the expression he wears, Peter figures it’s better to let it go. Best way to get over a minor crisis? Bowl of sugary brand cereal with plenty of milk. Maybe some toast.

“C’mon kid, at least eat something that won’t put you in a diabetic coma,” Tony calls after him, unable to understand Peter’s need for something sweet. How else is he supposed to feel better?

...It’s not like he can go to Aunt May about it.

To Peter’s surprise, it’s already dark out. Captain America and Thor are conversing in the kitchen, Black Widow sitting at the bar counter as she chimes into their conversation.

“Hey, kid,” Steve calls and Peter is admittedly starstruck, shaking himself off as the others turn toward him. “Haven’t seen you around in a while. How’s it going?”

“I, uh, it’s going good, Mr. Rogers,” he stammers, hesitating as to whether or not to attempt a casual stroll into the kitchen and rummage the cupboards for Lucky Charms. “Uh, how are you guys? I can’t believe it’s so late already.”

Tony is right behind him, lingering like a shadow.

“Not too late for you, is it?” Black Widow, no, _Natasha,_ turns to face him, a glass of dark red wine in between her fingers.

“Nah, not really, just...” itching at his blank memory feels like scratching the surface of something much deeper. The feeling unnerves him more than just a little. “Been a long day. Hey, is there anything left over from dinner?”

Tony moves toward the kitchen, turning back to give Peter a look. “Wait, I thought you didn’t want anything. You know you can order something here, kid.”

“Yeah, but...” he shies away with all eyes on him, an uneasy smile not too convincing for Tony’s scrutinizing stare. “I can get something for myself. I’ll be okay.”

With that, he confidently strides over to the cupboards as Thor greets him warmly, making Peter feel better already as he himself has an empty bowl near him with a spoon in it. The box of Lucky Charms, Thor points out, is in the cupboard below the sink.

“Don’t tell me you’re eating that stuff now,” Steve groans, to which Thor and Peter promptly ignore as Peter chatters with Thor about the goodness of brand name Lucky Charms. Much better than the generic stuff, they both agree.

“You act like you don’t have any vices of your own, Steve,” Natasha counters him, holding the wine glass between her fingers as she crosses one leg over the other. She turns to Peter with a smirk. “Lucky Charms are pretty good, though.”

“Here I thought you were a grown woman, Nat,” Steve shoots back, leaving the kitchen to head to the couch.

Voices come from the hall, growing louder with the sound of two pairs of footsteps.

“So...you’re telling me this is New York?”

Shadows appear and take shape, Dr. Banner’s voice easily picked out as he walks into the light. “Yes, it is.” Another more unfamiliar man is beside him, a thick gray blanket wrapped around him while he keeps his face ducked out of the light. “I just don’t understand how you could get here all the way from Portland all at once.”

Tony and Peter freeze while the others may not act as drastically, though tension fills the air thickly as the stranger, shivering while he tightly holds onto the blanket, raises his head some.

Bruce takes notice, raising a stiff hand to wave at the others. “Uh, hey there.” He doesn’t directly make eye contact with Tony, knowing it won’t end well, going by how Tony’s jaw clenches tightly. “This is Mr. Brock, and somehow he ended up here in New York from Portland, Oregon.”

Peter’s fingers are clenching the counter so hard he can feel the stone cracking under his fingers. Thor looks to him, picking up on what’s unspoken as memories start flooding back all at once. The spoon in his hand drops into the bowl with a loud clang.

“It’s Eddie, actually,” Eddie sniffles, squinting as he looks over them and rubs at his nose. “I was _in_ Portland, but I’m from San Fran. But I haven’t been in New York since...” he coughs into the blanket and shrugs.

Tony glares daggers, pure and utter malice directed straight at Bruce. “I didn’t expect him to be up and _alive,_ ” he speaks through gritted teeth and moves toward Peter who stares in horror at Eddie. Thor has now taken notice and Natasha as well as she tries to talk to him in a low voice, getting no response.

Living through flashbacks of the moment that _thing_ bit off that guy’s head, Peter pales as the blood rushes out of his head and pools into his stomach. A hand comes up to his mouth as Tony ushers his way in between Thor and Natasha, Thor’s big hand on Peter’s back as they both try to figure out what’s going on.

“Hey, is everything all right?” Bruce leaves Eddie’s side to make his way over to Peter where Tony crouches down to his level, Peter’s eyes on the floor as Tony talks to him in a low murmur. “Peter, are you okay? What’s going on?”

Swaying on his feet and refusing to budge, Peter shakes his head. As soon as he opens his mouth, saliva drips out in a long string. “He...he _ate_ that guy, Mr. Stark, he...”

“Okay, okay,” Tony is firm as he squeezes a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I know, kid. Why don’t you go sit down and we’ll talk about it, huh?” Looking to Thor, Tony nods to him. “Let me handle this.”

“No,” his voice is almost too quiet to be heard as Bruce stops before him, Steve now rising from the sofa to catch a glimpse of the commotion. “No, I’m good.” He looks up, wiping his mouth and makes no move to meet Eddie’s confused stare. Shrugging off Tony’s hand, he pulls away from the group forming around him. “I’m fine, guys. Just a little freaked out.”

“Wait, are you that kid?” Eddie has the best sense of timing. “The, uh, the one in the pajamas? What was it...”

He mumbles to himself for a few moments. “Wait, you’re the spider oneside kid!” he snaps, making a face that soon dissolves into a harsh sneeze. He sneezes again, his entire body wracked with shivers while his fingers tighten around the corners of his blanket.

When Eddie shakes and shivers in his makeshift blanket cape, he hardly looks like the monster Peter got the chance to meet in the worst of ways. Though his memory serves him right in that Eddie actually hadn’t hurt him then, he still feels a wariness in the pit of his stomach.

“Yeah, uh, sorry about that,” he snorts, coughing into his hand. “I didn’t think you were around for that.”

“And that still justifies _eating_ some guy’s head?” Tony snaps, coming around the counter with no sense of grace or tact. “Never mind biting off a guy’s head in the streets of New York. What the hell are you?”

Eddie’s eyes narrow. “I already told you. Ex-investigative reporter, got canned by Carlton Drake.” He glances between all of them curiously, glancing at them with an expression of utter confusion. “I’m surprised my name’s been forgotten already.”

“Who is this Carlton man?” Thor pipes in, leaning against the counter with his hip. He looks to the others for clarification, but Natasha shakes her head and Bruce is just as confused as he is.

“Carlton Drake? From the Life Foundation?” Eddie’s brows rise higher when silence meets him. “What the hell...”

“My thoughts exactly.” Tony’s scathing looks go ignored but not unnoticed. “Hey, Dr. Banner, you mind getting _him_ back where he belongs? You know, where _I_ put him?”

Bruce goes over to Eddie, stopping Tony who attempts the same. “Hold on, we’re not putting him in those again.” The look in his eyes tries to convey a sense of urgency. Lowering his voice, he speaks directly to Tony. “We will have a _situation_ if I try to get him back in there.”

“Look, I don’t care if we have a _situation_ on our hands. As far as I’m concerned, _he_ is the situation. A cannibalistic nutjob standing in the Avengers Tower who has shaved off a good chunk of Peter's life and I’ll be damned if that kid is gonna go gray by tomorrow.”

While an argument festers, Peter’s nausea quickly turns to an incredulous stare. “Carlton Drake? Like from the _Venom_ comic books?”

“What the—? No, last time I checked, he was very real, thank you,” Eddie grunts, but then squints at Tony, who’s been held off by Bruce. “What’re you talking about, kid?”

He turns away from the rest of them as another pair of footsteps creeps into his ears. Something about _Avengers,_ from the ex-iron Ronald McDonald. Which if his foggy memory serves him correctly, is a pretty popular comic book. One edition, to be exact, is sitting on his nightstand back at his apartment.

**You liked it too.**

“I’m gonna kill you,” Eddie grouses a little too quickly. It’s too late, because the next thing he knows is the sound of another voice, and a not too happy one at that.

“What was that?”

Eddie turns around and there’s _another_ guy standing right behind him. Short, cropped dirty blond hair and looking like a grandpa in a dad bod. A very good-looking one, as Venom likes to ascertain.

Venom is just as confused as Eddie is when seeing his favorite comic book character. _“Hawkeye?”_

“Holy crap,” Peter murmurs aloud, glancing back and forth from Eddie to Tony. “That’s Venom from my comic books!”

The room is abuzz with a mix of confusion and uncertainty. Tony, his phone buzzing in his pocket and has been since the beginning of this little standoff, is no more at ease than he was before. There is no doubt in his mind that he knows exactly who’s calling him in the middle of this strange development.

He finds it best to excuse himself as Steve asks what exactly is going on. “I need a drink,” he says to no one in particular, and presses the power button on his phone, ending the call.

Throughout the sound of Thor trying to understand Peter’s excitement and Natasha just as bewildered as him, Steve looks torn between confronting Eddie and talking to Bruce, his eyes sliding over to where Tony used to be and finding that one of the team is missing.

“Guys, hold on!” Peter, forgetting all notions of intimidation, goes near Eddie and stares at him with wide eyes. Examining him thoroughly, Eddie looks mildly annoyed, though it might just be the squint to his eyes and the fact he’s surrounded by strangers.

“You’re Eddie Brock, the hero from the _Venom_ comic books,” he says, speechless as he comes to a stop just a few feet away from Eddie. “I can’t believe I’m seeing _the_ Eddie Brock!”

Unsettled, Eddie keeps himself wrapped in his blanket and watches Steve disappear, forgetting about it as soon as his eyes flick back to the crowd gathered before him. “I like this kid,” is all he says, his voice nasal and rough. “Much nicer than you guys.”

Venom curls around Eddie’s shoulders, just under the skin. His presence is weaker than before, having run himself ragged with his crazy tactics of keeping them both alive. He’s beyond pleased without having to say a word, and Eddie already knows why, as his eyes move back to Hawkeye, who has already moved on around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The...The story's taking two worlds and smashing them together, Eddie is in New York, and I have no sense of canon continuity. None of this makes any sense.
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
